Musical Planets

[skysaw]

Some late thoughts in this extended topic made me think of an interesting music application I may write. Here are some initial thoughts on it. The application will map attributes of the planets in our solar system to sound waves. The type of mappings will be user-selectable. Each planet will represent one constant waveform. The frequency can be mapped to the planet's mass, diameter, rotation period, or orbital period. The amplitude can be mapped to the planet's mass, diameter, or orbital radius. The moons of a planet can be used to alter the timbre of the individual waveform by using their orbital period, mass, or diameter to create extra partials to the wave created by the planet itself. If I want to get a little more complex, I can internally plot the actual planetary orbits and calculate distance from a point in space over time to alter amplitude as well... this would be as if you could hear a planet's sound intensify and diminish as it passes. I could even calculate a virtual "dopplar" shift, hehe. Could be a tough project, and the results may not be that spectacular. I think I'll model it in Native Instruments' Reaktor to get an idea of the sounds first before deciding to build an application from scratch.

[Cyclic13]

Sounds awesome. Can't wait to see this idea bear fruit!

[Goldney]

How about being able to create your own planets?

[skysaw]

I started a little work on this idea yesterday, and have come across some interesting things. When basing amplitude or frequency on planet size or mass, it turns out that the ratio of the smaller planets to the largest are so great that they more than cover the audio range in terms of amplitude (even using the logorithmic decibel scale) and frequency. Greatly compressing the ranges helps, but is a bit of a distortion of the "pure" model of the solar system. Basing on orbital or rotational period seems a much better bet for frequency.

[Cyclic13]

Sounds great. Glad to see you took the bull by the horns. It'd be cool if you could have the listener/perceiver have realtime visuals as well, so they can zoom out or in to hear the changing frequency. That way they could make their own song or ambient mix corresponding with the visuals... OR.... You could map the visuals vibrational data to correspond to an already written song and see how your song looks as the universe... zooming in and out to different planets and back... Sounds like one trippy visual/audial ride if completed... See? who ever said the universe can't be viewed as sound?

[27]

I so want to visit planet Phish.

[skysaw]

You could map the visuals vibrational data to correspond to an already written song and see how your song looks as the universe... I wouldn't get too excited about this prospect. The kind of information I'm talking about mapping will generally make for a set of reasonably pure tones that are relatively stable in pitch and amplitude. In other words, a sustained or slightly evolving "sound bed," that doesn't much resemble music per se. Mapping in the other from an existing piece of music then presents a tremendous problem... how to map all of the other types of information contained in music besides sustained tones. It just doesn't make as much sense going in that direction because too many arbitrary decisions would have to be made, and the resulting model would scarcely resemble any recognizable solar system model.

[james-25:22pm]

Im confused...are you proposing some sort of software that 'composes', if you will, based on the behaviour of the planets? If so, sounds awesome....if not....its my idea now hahah